In War
by Riley Mourne
Summary: The price of change is heavy indeed, but it was never she who was meant to pay it.


**A/N: I have a ton of Solavellan one-shots in my drive, and I have never felt so intensely about a pairing before in my life _. Damn you_ , BioWare. You suck.**

 **Disclaimer: disclaimed. Now let me sob in peace.**

* * *

The Inquisitor is on her knees, and she will not stand again.

Vylara Lavellan sets her jaw, her dissolving hand cradled against her chest. Electric, searing _agony_ flares up her forearm with every heartbeat and shoots through her shoulder, skating across her jaw and up to the crown of her skull. She knows she is dying. She knows it will be mere moments.

Solas watches, silent. She has no idea what he is thinking.

She can scarcely draw in enough breath to speak. "Kill me."

The horror that springs across his face is incredible. " _Vhenan!_ "

"Please," she begs, nearly incoherent in her suffering. "I'll die regardless. If not from this, then when you rip apart the Veil." She swallows back a screech when the mark crackles and sputters, and she feels its rotten tendrils curl further down her side, wrapping around her throat. "If you must do this, Solas, let me be your first victim." He will not meet her gaze, and she watches a muscle feather in his clenched jaw. "To remind you of the cost."

"Vylara," his rich voice is gravelly, his eyes too bright. "I _can't_."

She snarls, the poisonous anger she had learnt to ignore in the years since he'd left her exploding in her chest, and it does nothing to dull the pain pulsing throughout her body. "But you would do it to the rest of our people?" she spits, her unmarked hand clenching around her own wrist. "You would tear child from mother, brother from sister, husband from wife? What makes _your_ heartache any more important than theirs?"

His steely eyes harden, but he does not answer. Silence reigns for several long moments, and her fury withers in her chest as she drops her head. She does not have the energy, nor the time, for it. If she must die, she would rather die in peace.

She lifts her gaze once more. " _Vhenan'ara_ ," she gasps, gold flecked-blue eyes pleading, "I will not survive your mission. If you cannot bear that thought-"

"You _will_ ," he snaps, and she can hear the desperation in his voice, see it on his face. "I-"

"Why? Because I'm a mage? Because I'm an elf?"

"Because I would protect you!"

"You haven't done that in _years_."

She may as well have shot him.

Solas recoils from her, shock and hurt sweeping across his features as he stares at her in bewilderment. Vylara chuckles mirthlessly, and her muscles spasm in response. _Just a few more minutes._ "What? You thought you could abandon me and I wouldn't care? You thought you could leave me, after _everything_ , with no explanation and I would be fine?" She sneers at his broken expression, unable to care about what she is doing to him. "I _loved_ you, Solas! I would have-" and her breath catches, and she cannot look at him. "I would have Bonded with you, had you stayed."

His hands are gentle when they lift her chin, turning her eyes to meet his own. "I never wished to cause you pain."

"I know." The smile she gives him is genuine. "And now I'm offering you the chance to end it."

"Vylara, _please_."

"You insist on this path. You say it will destroy the world as we know it. If you cannot pay the same price you demand from your people," she whispers, "You are no better than the Evanuris."

He flinches, and closes his eyes. She can hear his ragged breathing, and in an instant knows what he has chosen. She cannot say she is surprised.

"Always so stubborn," she rasps, and the Anchor bursts in her palm.

The Inquisitor screams.

* * *

It is Dorian who makes it through the mirror first. He doesn't know why or how it opened again, after Vylara had stumbled through it, but he doubts it was his incessant banging on the glass. Even so, he will not question it, and launches himself through as soon as the ripples appear.

The glen he arrives in is littered with Qunari, both petrified and bloody. He spares them only a passing glance.

He can hear Solas, and he is howling.

Dorian's blood curdles in his veins, gooseflesh erupting on his skin as he sprints across the creek and up the wide staircase. He skids around burly statues, nearly crashing straight into the Vidasaala's stone backside. He dodges at the last second, and when he slides around her body, what he sees rips the air straight from his lungs.

Vylara Lavellan is dead, her Anchor-bearing hand incinerated, the left side of her body bloody and charred. Her vibrant red hair is _soaked_ with viscera and gore, half her face blackened and her lovely skin peeling.

And Solas, face pale and hands shaking, is curled around her corpse as he cradles her in his lap.

Nausea boils in his stomach and Dorian very nearly loses his lunch. Vylara's blood is _everywhere_ , dripping from the Qunari statues, swirling in tiny eddies in the pretty creek. A good portion is smeared across Solas's agonized expression, splattered across his golden armor, and Dorian watches as the elf throws back his head and roars at the setting sky.

The Magister cannot find his tongue. Instead, he stumbles forward, his eyes stinging and breath escaping in great heaving gasps, and falls at Vylara's side. With trembling fingers he reaches out and closes her remaining wide blue eye, sweeps the errant strands of dripping hair out of her face.

" _Maker_ ," he gasps, and he can feel his heart shattering in his chest. His vision blurs and Dorian pretends he doesn't notice his own tears as they begin to slide down his face. "Sweet girl, you didn't deserve this."

"No," Solas agrees, and Dorian has almost completely forgotten he is there. "She didn't."

His voice is like a match to a pyre.

"You son of a bitch," Dorian snarls, raw, furious _hatred_ spewing from his mouth. He lurches to his feet, clenching his hands into throbbing fists as he struggles not to strike him. "This is _your fault!_ "

"I know."

For a split second he is thrown, but his surprise is lost in the flames of his venomous, all-consuming grief. "You could have saved her! You kept the Anchor from killing her all those years, and you _left!_ " Solas makes no reply, his eyes fixed on Vylara's empty face. "What, once you'd taken _everything_ from her, she no longer mattered? Once she'd served her purpose, she wasn't worth saving?"

Solas merely hunches over her body, absorbing Dorian's wrath without a sound. The Magister is only incensed further, and with a bellowing roar, flames explode from his fists, licking up his forearms and snapping by his ear. Some hysterical part of him shrieks to watch his hair. " _Say_ something, you arrogant, selfish, conniving _bastard!_ " His shout echoes across the glen, rolling out into the ravine where it booms across the chasm.

The elf makes no reply. Dorian is heaving, his teeth locked around the wretched sobs trying to burst from his chest. Vylara, sweet Vylara, who gave everything and asked for nothing. Who smiled and laughed and sang without a care, who summoned fire and lightning as if it were nothing, who warped the Fade to her will without a thought. Who loved fiercely, more ardently than he had ever seen before in his life. Who accepted him for who he was, and not who the world told her he would be.

His best and only friend.

Dead.

"I never understood it," Dorian sneers, and to his horror, his voice cracks on the last word. "Why she couldn't let you go. She slept in the rotunda for _months_ , stared at your paintings for hours, every damn day." He swallows, desperately trying to be angry against the swelling tide of heartbreak. "I told her to snap out of it, that you weren't _worth it_ , that you never were _._ She never listened to me."

Solas will not look at him.

"The only one who could have saved her. And you didn't even have the decency to tell her goodbye."

Silence.

"Did you kill her, Solas."

" _No!_ " The word explodes from him with such force Dorian takes an involuntary step back. The elf's voice is guttural, rough and aching. "If you must know one truth, let it be that one."

"Tell me what happened, then! I loved her, too!" A strangled noise escapes from him before he can stop it. "Everyone back home. We all deserve to know."

For a moment, Dorian thinks he isn't going to answer. Solas merely trembles, his silent weeping doing nothing to soothe Dorian's own throbbing grief, until he finally manages to compose himself long enough to formulate a response.

"The Anchor," he says. "She could not… sustain it." Another heaving breath. "She asked me to do it. To kill her." And for the first time, he lifts his eyes from her blackened features, and Dorian knows he will never be able to forget the _emptiness_ he sees there, for the rest of his days. "I could not."

"But you let it happen."

The elf shakes his head, wiping vainly at the blood on his face. "I had every intention of returning her to you. She knew she was dying." He inhales shakily, closing his eyes. "Distraction. Keep them talking. The oldest tactic known, and I did not see it."

Dorian tries to quell his own tremors with little success. His voice breaks when he says, "I will _never_ forgive what you did to her, Solas."

"Nor will I."

"Good. I hope you _rot_."

Solas's answering smile is entirely hollow and without humor. "As do many others, my friend."

* * *

They bury her at Skyhold.

Dorian would have liked to take her back to the Free Marches, to where her clan had roamed, but then he remembers that they had died, too, and decides she would want to lay where she had been happiest. Cassandra, with tears in her eyes, can only nod her agreement.

The ceremony is short. There are few in attendance. Thousands had wanted to witness, to say a final goodbye to the woman who had saved them, but Josephine had turned them all away. The first time she has avoided hosting a social gathering of any sort, he is sure.

Cullen stands at attention, out of his armor and in plainclothes, for once, and he is so much smaller in them. The scar on his mouth quivers and his jaw clenches when her pyre is lit.

Vivienne is stoic, but Dorian sees how bright her eyes are.

Leliana sings, her sweet voice quaking all the while. When she abruptly stops and turns away, no one mentions it.

Cole flits from person to person, lost.

Blackwall's silent tears disappear into his beard, and his hands clench and unclench at his sides.

Sera does not cry, but leans on Blackwall's shoulder, her eyes closed. He holds her tightly, and they do not say a word.

The Iron Bull and his Chargers are utterly silent.

Varric is numb. He makes not a sound, staring with vacant, wide eyes at her slender silhouette within the flames.

Dorian himself is the one who starts. He's never been much of one for mourning aloud, where others might take advantage, but she deserves it. Deserves so much more than what she had been given.

 _Shadows fall_

 _And hope has fled._

 _Steel your heart_

 _The dawn will come._

One by one, they all join him. It is Cole who takes it up first.

 _The shepard's lost_

 _And his home is far_

 _Keep to the stars_

 _The dawn will come_

Cassandra can barely muster the will to force the words out, and Dorian sees her curl at the waist. She folds her arms around herself to keep from falling to pieces, but still, she sings.

 _The night is long_

And the path is dark

Look to the sky

For one day soon

The dawn will come.

By the time they have all harmonized, the soldiers have taken up the tune. The Templars, the Mages, the civilians, the clerics. All raise their voices, and no one has forgotten the last time they had all done so.

Dorian closes his eyes.

 _Bare your blade_

 _And raise it high_

 _Stand your ground_

 _The dawn will come_

In the distance, a long, lonely howl.


End file.
